[vimeo 38681202 w=250 h=141] bookshelfporn:
Birth of a BookBeautiful video of traditional pre-press, offset print to produce hand-bound books.
Glen Milner produced this book-binding vignette at Smith-Settle Printers in Leeds, England as the binders bound Suzanne St Albans’ Mango and Mimosa.
Sri Lanka - Polonnaruva (capitale du Royaume Singhalais au XIKIè siècle): entrée de la salle du Conseil de Parakrambahu. 1991.
I’m going to tell you something that my Republican friends are loath to admit out loud: climate change is real. I am a moderate Republican, fiscally conservative; a fan of small government, accountability, self-empowerment, and sound science. I am not a climate scientist. I’m a meteorologist, and the weather maps I’m staring at are making me uncomfortable. No, you’re not imagining it: we’ve clicked into a new and almost foreign weather pattern. To complicate matters, I’m in a small, frustrated and endangered minority: a Republican deeply concerned about the environmental sacrifices some are asking us to make to keep our economy powered-up, long-term. It’s ironic. The root of the word conservative is “conserve.” A staunch Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, set aside vast swaths of America for our National Parks System, the envy of the world. Another Republican, Richard Nixon, launched the EPA. Now some in my party believe the EPA and all those silly “global warming alarmists” are going to get in the way of drilling and mining our way to prosperity. Well, we have good reason to be alarmed.
On Thursday, the flood of bad reports continued, with the independent Fair Labor Association releasing the results of its probe of Foxconn, outlining the expected litany of abuses. But for once, this was not bad news for Apple. The company had sanctioned the FLA’s report, and its response was a masterstroke: Apple immediately announced a deal with Foxconn to hire tens of thousands of new workers, tighten safety and overtime rules, and build better employee dormitories. Instead of headlines blaring the Fair Labor Association’s findings, Friday morning brought news stories focused on Apple’s determination to change how it does business with its suppliers—indeed, to set a new standard for China’s entire technology manufacturing sector.In one deft move, Apple has pivoted from villain to crusading hero. But wait—won’t all those changes cost a lot of money? Yes. And that will benefit Apple even more.
Foxconn is by far the world’s largest electronics manufacturer. It’s best known for building iPhones and iPads, but it’s also a major supplier for Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Amazon, Sony, and many others. Any improvements it makes at Apple’s behest should spill over to its work for those companies as well. And any progress Foxconn demands from its own suppliers—some of which are believed to be even less scrupulous in their labor practices—will compound the effect. Some analysts believe Foxconn is so large and influential that higher wages, tighter regulations, and better working conditions there will ripple across all of China.
“With a physical sit-in, people are putting their lives on the line standing in front of a building. It’s limited in scope and requires a physical commitment,” he said. “Today, anyone with a $200 laptop can bring about a blockage, essentially silence a Web site into oblivion. There is no real physical risk to that, so it can be kind of frivolous. I think there’s a qualitative difference between the two because of that.”There are times when it is acceptable to break the law, and those who participate in civil disobedience accept the risks, he said. “Whereas, online the ease with which anybody can create havoc and silence speech is much greater.”
Deibert worries that stretching the definition of civil disobedience in this manner is prompting police and prosecutors to make criminals out of youngsters who don’t understand the consequences of their actions. And he is concerned that the movement will ultimately lead to greater authoritarian control over the Internet and a diminishment of freedoms.
Richard Dawkins and other New Atheists are often criticised for failing to understand that being religious is not about beliefs – but about cultural practice and social participation. Yet criticising New Atheists for their “false beliefs” makes precisely the same mistake and reduces this culture to its propositional statements and knowledge claims. In fact, people are brought together and tied together by their different kinds of non-religious positions, and to criticise one of these cultures, the New Atheism, on the grounds that it does not appreciate that religion is a team sport is to miss the point that atheism, too, is a team sport.Obsessing about how coherent the arguments of New Atheists are – rather than noticing how popular the movement is; the emotional feelings of recognition that some readers have in response to it; how people discuss New Atheism with each other and use it to help articulate shared non-religious positions – is to do precisely what critics would have the New Atheists stop doing. You don’t have to share the New Atheists’ beliefs to treat their culture with some respect – and be interested not in whether its claims are correct but in why people are drawn to it and what is underlying the anti-theist prejudices that are sometimes expressed in these claims. The notion that cultural and social investments are more important than beliefs is fine, but it has to cut both ways.
From 1999-2001, while living in London, I would go on epic, overambitious book-buying sprees, telling myself I was heading into town to “write in a cafe” only to return with bags laden with books from the hipper end of the US literary canon, perhaps hoping that the sheer fact that I owned them would turn me into the writer I wanted to be. When I think of the way my book shelves looked when I was 23, I realise they perhaps were no more about me than they were about a stranger I subconsciously imagined would one day visit my house. This stranger was an uncommon combination of extremely tasteful, hugely judgmental and ridiculously attractive.I waited very patiently for this stranger for quite a while, only for the finicky bastard not to show. Somewhere along the way, I became a more honest book owner: I now know that nine times out of 10 I’ll enjoy a book about a dysfunctional family or the comedies of small-town American life more than I will one about a drug addict or rock star. I don’t hold on to books I didn’t enjoy – even those that critical wisdom told me I “should” have – and I no longer keep a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow around the house for hypothetical purposes.
In the midst of a spring practice that, by all accounts, is going well, Nick Saban received a contract extension with an immediate bump in salary to $5.3 million, an increase of $550,000 over what he would have made in 2012 under his old contract. The extension could keep Saban in Tuscaloosa until 2020, at which point he will be making $6 million. And should he stay for the duration of the contract, he will have pocketed a total of $44,983,333.86 from the good citizens of the nation’s ninth poorest state, 16.1 percent of whom are living below the poverty line.But he wins football games….
Meanwhile Gov. Robert Bentley announced that general funding to the Department of Public Safety and other state agencies would be cut by 10 percent because of revenue shortages. Public Safety director Hugh McCall said he hopes to avoid layoffs of state troopers and other employees.
It is, one would assume, what the market will bear.
Exactly two things have made air travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door, and convincing passengers that they need to fight back. Everything else has been a waste of money. Add screening of checked bags and airport workers and we are done. All the rest is security theatre. If we truly want to be safer, we should return airport security to pre-9/11 levels and spend the savings on intelligence, investigation and emergency response.
Scenes from The Golden Beetle (1907, dir. Segundo de Chomón), a 3-minute fantasy trick film notable for its spectacular use of color, which was done by hand. Online here.(via)